The Clock Winder (36 page)

“Seventeen-year locusts,” he said.

“Never heard of them,” said P.J.

“Cicadas, in point of actual fact.”

The words were Timothy’s, dredged up from a long-ago summer, and so was the tone—dry and scientific, so unlike Peter that even P.J. noticed and looked surprised. The last time the locusts had been here, Peter was twelve. He remembered the fact of their presence, and Timothy’s lecture on
them, but not what they were really
like
—not these viciously buzzing objects which, he saw now, swung through the air on invisible strings and hung like glittering fruit from all the bushes. P.J. had one on her shoulder; it rattled menacingly when he brushed it away. When he stepped on the sidewalk, he crunched countless pupa shells which lay curled and hollow, small beige shrimps with all their legs folded tightly inward.

They crossed the shiny gray floorboards of the veranda. P.J. knocked at the door. “Knock, knock!” she called out gaily. She always did that, but today Peter found it irritating. “There
is
a doorbell,” he said, and reached around her to press it. P.J. looked up at him, her eyes like round, rayed suns in her Innocence eyelashes.

It was a child who opened the door for them. A squat little blond boy with a solemn face, wearing miniature Levis.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi there,” said Peter, too heartily. “I’m your Uncle Peter. Remember me?”

“No.”

“So there, Peter Emerson,” P.J. said. She laughed and bent down to the little boy’s level. “I’m P.J. What’s your name?”

He studied her. Peter cleared his throat. “This is George, I believe,” he said. “Matthew’s boy. Is your grandma home, George?”

“Yup.”

“Could we see her?”

“She’s in the kitchen,” George said.

He turned back in the direction he had come from. The cuffs of his Levis dragged on the floor. “Well,” said Peter “Shall we go in?”

They followed George across the hallway—Peter leading
P.J. as if she were another child, clutching her by the arm while she looked all around her. They went through the butler’s pantry, windowless and stale, and then into the sudden brightness of the kitchen.

His mother was standing just as he had imagined her—wearing soft colors, her hair a clear gold, surrounded by her family. The only thing wrong was that she and all the others had their backs turned. They were facing squarely away from him, watching something out the rear door. “It’s the screens, they will have to be mended in the morning,” his mother said. “Look at those holes!
Anything
could get through them.”

“Hello, Mother.”

She turned, but even when she looked directly at him she seemed distracted. “What?” she said. “What—
Peter!”

Everyone turned. Their faces were momentarily surprised and unguarded.

“Peter, what are you
doing
here?”

“Oh, just passing through. Mother, this is P.J. P.J., this is my brother Andrew, my brother Matthew’s wife Gillespie—where’s Matthew?”

“He’s still at work,” his mother said. “Are you staying long? Why didn’t you tell us? Have you eaten supper?”

“We were heading back from Georgia—” Peter said. His mother stood on tiptoe to kiss him. Her cheek felt withered and too soft, but she still wore the same light, powdery perfume, and she held her back as beautifully straight as ever. Her speech was slower now than her children’s—as slow as Gillespie’s southern drawl, and hesitating over consonants. “Georgia?” she said. “What would you go to
Georgia
for?”

“You look older,” said Andrew. He looked older himself, but happy. His hair was thinning, and below his concave
chest a paunch had started. Someone’s apron was tied around his middle. “If I’d known you were coming—” he said, and then P.J. stuck her hand out to him. He looked at it a moment before accepting it.

“I’m very glad to meet you all,” said P.J.

Andrew frowned. He was nervous with strangers—something Peter had forgotten to warn her about. But before the silence grew noticeable, his sister-in-law stepped in. “We’re glad to meet you,” she said. “Good to see you again,” she told Peter, and she shifted the diapered baby who rode her hip and held out her hand. Peter took it with relief; her cool, hard palm seemed to steady him.

“We were just on this trip, you see,” he told her. “Passing through Baltimore. Thought we’d stop in. I wasn’t sure you’d—are we interrupting something?”

“Oh, of
course
not!” his mother said gaily.

“But with everyone at the back door there, I didn’t know—”

“It was a locust. Gillespie was shooing it out of the house for us. Oh, these locusts, Peter, you can’t imagine. We keep the house just
sealed
, and still they get in. Will this screen be seen to, now?”

“I’ll mend it in the morning,” Gillespie said.

“Mother is scared of locusts,” Andrew said.

“You’re none too fond of them yourself, Andrew dear,” his mother told him.

“Well, no.”

And meanwhile P.J. stood smiling hopefully, with her belongings still clutched to her chest, looking from one face to another and settling finally on the baby, who was playing with a long strand of hair that had straggled from Gillespie’s bun. “Oh, isn’t it
darling,”
she said. “What’s its name?”

“She isn’t an it, she’s a she,” Andrew said stiffly.

“Well, how could anyone tell?” Gillespie asked him. “All she’s got on is a diaper.”

“Her
face
is a girl’s face. No one should mistake it.”

“Oh, hush, Andrew, I never heard of such a thing.”

Peter waited for Andrew to get insulted, to collapse in a kitchen chair or turn on his heel and leave, but he didn’t. He had changed—a fact that Peter forgot all over again each time he left home. He was the only person in this house who had changed. His mother remained a gilded pink and white and Gillespie continued shuffling around in dungarees, her face a little broader and more settled-looking but her fingers still nicked by whittling knives and her manner with babies still as offhand as if she were carrying a load of firewood. But Andrew had mellowed; he had calmed and softened. (“Andrew is in such a state,” Mrs. Emerson had written last winter. “You know how he gets when Gillespie’s expecting, I believe he’d go through the labor pains
for
her if only he could.” Only Peter seemed to remember the day after Timothy’s funeral, when Andrew had paced the living room saying, “Where is that girl? Where? I’ll get her for this.”) Now instead of taking offense Andrew smiled, first at Gillespie and then at the baby, whose cheek he lightly touched. “Her name is Jenny,” he told P.J.

“Oh,” said P.J. She looked bewildered, but after a moment she smiled too.

“Now then,” Mrs. Emerson said. “Shall we go into the living room where it’s cool?”

She led the way, calming her skirt with her hands as if it were a long and stately gown. If the kitchen had become Gillespie’s, with its wood chips across the table and its scatter of tools beside the breadbox, the living room was still Mrs. Emerson’s. The same vases marched across the mantel; the same
dusty gray smell rose from the upholstery. The red tin locomotive under the coffee-table could have been Peter’s own, back in the days when he was a child here anxiously studying the grownups’ faces.

His mother settled in her wing chair, across from Andrew, and Gillespie sat in the high-backed rocker with both children nestled against her. Peter chose the couch, beside P.J. He felt she needed some support. She was nervously twisting her purse strap, and the licorice bag rustled on her knees like something alive. “I just love old houses,” she said.

“How long can you stay?” his mother asked Peter. “And don’t say you’re just passing through. I want you to plan on a nice long visit this time.”

“I have a lot of work to get back to,” Peter said.

“In the summer? What kind of work would you do in the summer?”

But then, remembering her social duties, her face became all upward lines and she turned to P.J. “I hope you’re not tired from the trip, J.C.,” she said.

“P.J.,” said P.J. “No ma’am, I’m not a bit tired. I’m just so happy to finally
meet
you all. I feel like I know you already, Petey’s told me so much about you.”

A lie. Peter had told her next to nothing. And he hadn’t even mentioned her to his family, but Mrs. Emerson continued wearing her bright hostess look and leaning forward in that hovering posture she always assumed to show an open mind. “Where are you from, dear?” she asked.

“Well, New Jersey now. Before it was Georgia.”

“Isn’t that nice?”

P.J. shifted in her seat, deftly smoothing the backs of her thighs as if she wore a dress. “You look just like I thought you would,” she said—oh, always trying to get down to the personal, but she was no match for Mrs. Emerson.

“I suppose this heat is no trouble to you at all then,” Mrs. Emerson said.

“Ma’am?”

“Coming from Georgia.”

“Oh. No ma’am.”

“Peter darling,” Mrs. Emerson said, “I want you to tell me
everything
. What have you been up to, now?”

“Well, I—”

“Where are my cigarettes?” She slid her fingers between the arm of the chair and the cushion. Peter, who hadn’t been going to tell her anything anyway, felt irritated at being cut off. He kept a pointed silence, with his arms folded tightly across his chest. He thought his mother was like a hunter who set traps and coaxed and baited until the animal was safely caught, and then she forgot she had wanted him and went off to some new project. “Nothing is where it should be in this house,” she said. “Gillespie, I think we could do with some iced tea to drink.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Gillespie handed the baby to Andrew and went to the kitchen, with George tailing her. P.J. sat back and smiled around the room. The only sound to be heard was the clatter of locusts. Finally P.J. said, “Mrs. Emerson, have you got a family album?”

“Album?”

“I’d like to see pictures of Peter when he was a baby.”

“Oh, there are hundreds,” Mrs. Emerson said. She had filled more albums than any coffee-table could hold—rows upon rows of snapshots precisely dated—but she didn’t offer to bring them out.
“Somewhere
around,” she said vaguely, and she turned to stare out a window. What connection did this girl have with Emersons?

What connection did
Peter
have? He sat plucking the
knees of his slacks, as empty of things to say as he had been in Georgia, as hopeful of acceptance as P.J. From the kitchen came the smells of supper cooking, roast beef and baked potatoes. There was nothing like cooking smells to make you feel out of place in someone else’s house. While he was on the open highway life here had been going on in a pattern he could only guess at—meat basted, knife sharpened, bustling hunts for misplaced spoons, systems and rituals and habits they never had to think about. Mrs. Emerson lit her cigarette and reached without looking for an ashtray, which was exactly where she had known it would be. A silvery strand of baby-spit spun down onto Andrew’s hand, and out of nowhere Andrew produced a folded diaper and neatly wiped Jenny’s chin. P.J. was telling Mrs. Emerson how she just loved this section of Baltimore. (She just loved
everything
. What was the matter with her?) At her first pause, Andrew turned to Peter. “How’s the job going?” he asked. Mrs. Emerson said, “Do you like New Jersey?” To counterbalance P.J., he was blunter than he should have been. “I hate it,” he said.

“Oh, Peter.”

“If there was another job open
anywhere
, I’d take it in a flash.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

He peered at his mother. She was perfectly serious. Jobs nowadays were scarce and money scarcer, and no one was interested in chemists any more, but what did she know about that? It was possible that she wasn’t even aware there was a war on. Since he first left home there had been upheavals of every kind—assassinations, riots, not once referred to in letters from his mother. Oh well, once: “Mrs. Bittern was just here collecting food for riot victims. I gave her a can of pitted black olives.…” “I had hoped you might teach in some university,” she told him now. “Well, times are hard,” was all he said. She
frowned at him, distantly, secure in her sealed weightless bubble floating through time. While he was in Vietnam, she had kept writing to ask if he had visited any tourist sights. And could he bring home some sort of native craft to solve her Christmas problems?

“Petey’s school is just a
real
nice place,” P.J. said. “He couldn’t hope for a better job.”

“That’s all
you
know,” Andrew said.

“What?”

“Peter made straight A’s all through school. Are you qualified to say he should stay in some mediocrity in New Jersey?”

“Oh! Well!”

She looked at Peter to defend her, but he didn’t. He was irritated by the soft, hurt look on her face. It was his mother who stepped in. “Now, Andrew,” she said. “You mustn’t mind Andrew, J.C. He’s hard on outsiders. The second time he met
Gillespie
, he shot her.” She laughed, and so did Andrew—a contented, easy sound. Peter heard her without surprise, although he had never been told about any shooting, but P.J. gave a little gasp and drew closer to him. “With a
gun?”
she said.

“Oh, Mother, now—” said Andrew.

But he was saved by a noise from the fireplace—a rattle as steady and senseless as some wind-up toy. Mrs. Emerson screamed. Her cigarette flew out of her hand and landed on the rug, and when Peter leaped up to stamp it out he collided with P.J., who reached the spot before he did but then tripped over one of her long twisted sandal straps. “Gillespie!” Mrs. Emerson screamed. “Gillespie, a locust!”

Then out came Gillespie, skating along levelly with a brim-full pitcher. She poured a dollop of tea on the cigarette
and set the pitcher down on the coffee-table. “Where?” she said.

“In the fireplace!” said Mrs. Emerson, already scuttling toward the dining room. “Oh, I
told
you you should stuff that chimney up! Anything, I said, could get down inside it and the flue handle came off in Matthew’s hands two years ago—” Andrew followed her out of the room, shielding the baby, and Peter rose but had nowhere to go. He didn’t feel up to helping out. He could imagine how cold and heavy a locust must be, slithering down the back of his neck, and he was relieved to see that Gillespie seemed to have the situation in control. She crouched before the fireplace with a rolled-up magazine. George stood by with the poker, scratching the front of his grimy T-shirt and looking bored. “Here, buddy,” Gillespie told the locust. She poked at the ashes. “Come on,
come
on.” The whirring grew louder. The magazine rattled as if a fan blade had hit it and then up swooped the locust, evading Gillespie, zooming toward the ceiling with an angry buzz. Mrs. Emerson screamed again. She ducked behind Andrew, clutching him by the sides. “Will I survive this summer?” she asked.